by Laurie Penny
Writing and sharing those stories helps us feel less alone but, more than that, comparing experiences of oppression and hardship and hurt makes it possible to believe that the problem might not just be with us, as individuals. The problem might not be that we are not strong enough. The problem might be broader, more structural, something that those with privilege have to answer for personally and together. And that is a terrifying notion for anyone with a vested interest in the status quo. No wonder our words are dismissed as the confessional chatter of hysterics. If they weren’t, they might have to be taken seriously.
These are frantic, fearful times. History and language are accelerating, and unexpected people are taking control of both in unexpected ways. If there was ever a time when a clear line existed between writing and living, that time is over. Today we think, work and agitate in text. We conduct our social lives in text. The public sphere is a whole lot more public, and a whole lot less predictable, than mid-century theorists ever anticipated. Dissatisfied by the stories told about what women are and what they do, new writers are emerging to reshape the narrative. The public sphere now includes a great many people whose voices, if they were ever noted at all, were included in footnotes. Women, girls, queer people, people of colour, people living in the margins of our collective cultural script, are suddenly rewriting it. That changes what it means to be a writer, just as it changes what it means to be a human being living and thinking and acting in the world.
That means the way we think about sex is changing. The way we think about gender identity is changing. The way we think about how to live and love and fight and fuck is changing so fast that you can, on a clear day, feel the breeze of it in your hair. We have gone, in the space of a decade, from the collective assumption that there was no such thing as ‘date rape’ to public discussion of ‘rape culture’, to holding public figures to account for their treatment of women, girls and children. We have gone from the understanding that the best women could hope for was to balance exhausting paid employment and childcare, to teenagers talking about wages for housework.
It has become commonplace to speak of ‘waves’ of feminism. I’ve never seen it that way. Feminism, for me, is not a set of waves, but a great grumbling tsunami, moving slow, sweeping across a blighted landscape of received assumptions, washing away old certainties. The big wave has hardly begun to hit, and already all of us are changed. This pace of change, of course, is rather frightening to some people, and the backlash is on.
Many of my energies in the past decade have gone into contesting that backlash. Across the world, parochialism, racism and vintage sexism are offered as answers to the climate of fear in which we find ourselves. We are told that we ought to be looking back to the certainties of a fantasy, fictional past that is perpetually just out of reach. I prefer to look to the future. Feminism, of course, has always been an exercise in science fiction.
Here it comes: I don’t hate men as individuals. I’m obliged to start out by saying that, of course, for the benefit of the fragile among us who believe that talking about women’s rights is akin to calling for some sort of androcaust. In my case, the not-hating-men thing also happens to be true. I have, however, increasingly little patience with men as a social phenomenon.
Over the years, I’ve been attacked with such relentless spleen that I have become more timid with my heart when I sit down to pour it out on the page. I have learned to fear my own capacity for empathy, where men are concerned. They can be so fragile. So often, they take any challenge to their received narratives, any questioning of their ideas about the world, as a profound identity threat, especially if the question or the challenge comes from a woman. Of course, of course, not all men. But enough of them.
Sometimes, men and boys ask me whether and how they can be feminists. I don’t think anyone needs permission for that, let alone my permission. But merely identifying as a thing is just a start. You also have to take responsibility for your goddamn actions. Feminism is active. It’s not something you are; it’s something you do. It’s what you fight for that matters. Feminism is not an identity but a movement, a way of living. And feminism isn’t just about women – it’s about liberating everyone from gender oppression, but since women are most oppressed by modern gender norms and laws, and since the movement has always been driven by women’s politics, ‘feminism’ is an appropriate name – it’s almost as if men can’t bear to be part of a movement that suggests for a moment that women might lead.
Feminism isn’t about fighting men all the time. But I’m not interested in making my politics safe and sweet and unthreatening for men, because ultimately, feminism does threaten the status quo, and the status quo is one where men have more social power than women. Feminism is about fairness, redistribution of wealth and power and influence; it’s about changing the old order whereby men have had most of those things for most of human history. There’s only so far you can dilute the message, make it nice and fluffy and safe, before you lose the point altogether. So, again, you may as well say what you mean. The stakes are too high to apologise before we’ve even begun. There’s no point being nice in a burning world.
I’ve heard it said that for a progressive, equal society to come about, the one we have now has to collapse completely. I’ve heard this said almost overwhelmingly by men on the left who nurse guilty hard-ons over visions of dying in battle as martyrs. Civilisation, they say, needs to collapse completely before we can have the revolution we need. I have heard almost no women argue this, partly because women and queers have less reason to fantasise about civil unrest, and partly because in practice, what the slow collapse of society actually entails is women picking up the pieces, mending the broken bones and broken hearts and shouldering the extra work where the fabric of society rots and rends.
When I was a child, I was afraid of almost everything. I was afraid of nuclear war, of global warming. I was afraid of the ozone layer and the government and getting my SAT results. I spent much of my young life convinced that I would not make it to adulthood, that some planet-wide disaster would inevitably sweep away not just me and my family and my favourite teachers and everyone I loved, but the entire society we lived in, the whole species, everything solid in the world. That hasn’t happened – not to me, not yet, and not to many of us. But we still live in a society convinced of its own imminent collapse. Fascists are mustering on the fringes of politics to dominate the mainstream. The Middle East is fighting to be rid of the rule of murderous clerics. The floodwaters are rising, and that’s no longer a metaphor.
When I found feminism as a young person, it was a comfort in unexpected ways. Not just because it gave words to the injustices of sex and gender I saw around me every day, but because I had found something I could do. All right, I couldn’t stop the world sliding into chaos, but maybe I could do my part, in some small way, to make that chaos fairer. To make it more liveable.
It is precisely at times of crisis that utopian thinking is most necessary. I am not going to stop writing and dreaming about a better world for women, for queer people and for everyone left out of mainstream discourse just because the planet is half alight. These things don’t matter less at times like this. They matter more. What type of world would possibly be worth winning if women can’t win too?
In all this chaos it can be hard to separate signal from noise. This book is an attempt to do so – to bring together some of the writing that has mattered most to me and form it into a coherent whole. These columns and essays were written between 2013 and 2016, usually under savage deadline pressure in the full glare of online scrutiny. Together, they’re something more. The articles in this book are intended to start conversations, not finish them. In the words of the Coilhouse magazine collective: to inform, inspire and infect.
There is a sense of urgency to the writings collected here. Urgency is appropriate. We are trying to change the world for the better in the middle of stacking crises, and this is no time to go on the defensive, no time to capitulat
e, to accept a diluted definition of freedom. On the contrary. This is a good time to gather our weapons. If it’s all going to end in ruins, let’s have them be beautiful ruins. Let’s have fairness there, and care, and mutual aid. Let’s have men and women and everyone else meet each other as equals in the clearing dust. And let’s start now, while we still have Wi-Fi and central heating.
And meanwhile, I’ll keep on writing as if – to borrow Alasdair Gray’s phrase – we lived in the early days of a better nation. I hope you’ll read this book the same way, though if you turn the page, you’ll find it starts on treacherous terrain. It starts with politics.
1
Of Madness and Resistance: A US Election Diary 2016
A GREAT GROPE FOR POWER
Late October 2016
There’s no drug quite like the confidence of a mediocre white man, and even lifelong users like Donald Trump have to be careful when mainlining in public. Witness, if you will, the epic meltdown captivating headline writers across the globe as the Republican nominee for president of the goddamn United States of America disintegrates into a hot mess of misogynist sleaze, jawing fascist buzzwords as the global audience he always craved looks on in disbelief. Trump’s supporters may be shamefaced, but the whole cringeworthy spectacle is hardly less humiliating for anyone who still half-believes in democracy and the rule of law.
The second presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump resembled an extended exchange between a piece of online political punditry and the comments section beneath it. On the eve of the debate – a mere forty-eight hours after the leak of the now infamous video which featured Trump bragging that his celebrity status enabled him to kiss, grope and try to have sex with women – he held a press conference to which he invited any female he could find who had ever made a sexual complaint against Bill Clinton, attempting to smear Hillary by association. The man who boasted about ‘grabbing’ women ‘by the pussy’ had no compunction about showcasing alleged assault victims to aid his own sleazy fumble for power.
Hillary didn’t rise to it. She remained the picture of dignity throughout, which wasn’t hard given what was standing opposite her. It was clear from the start of the debate that there was something badly wrong with Trump: that the yammering personification of the white male nationalist id was not just unprincipled but actively unwell. Over ninety excruciating minutes, he prowled about the stage, gurning and muttering to himself like a matinee murderer debating the devil on his shoulder. At one point he seemed so incensed that the cameras were not on him that he actually started humping his own chair. It was the sort of slow-moving car crash that sends reality TV ratings through the ceiling, specifically, in this case, a glass ceiling.
The entire election campaign of 2016 has resembled a wet dream that David Lynch might have had after falling asleep watching Fox News. Trump rapidly lost his grip not just on propriety but on human language, shouting made-up words and incoherent statements such as ‘Syria is no longer Syria. Syria is Russia . . . I believe we need to get ISIS’ and promising to ‘bring economics to the people’. He threatened to prosecute his opponent as soon as he became president. He sounded, more than anything, like a conservative hatebot of your drunken racist uncle, algorithmically spunking out gobs of truthiness.
The rhetorical model did not recall Abraham Lincoln so much as it did Tay, Microsoft’s short-lived artificial intelligence Twitter chatbot, who was taught by armies of alt-right trolls with time on their hands to say things like ‘feminism is cancer’ and ‘I love Hitler’. I was reminded that back in the heyday of what was once called the blogosphere, editors went through a phase of believing that the comments section amounted to the voice of the people, rather than whoever was bored, angry and hateful enough to dedicate hours to recreational harassment, particularly of women, people of colour and anyone with the temerity to hold an opinion who was not white, male, straight and conservative. We learned, but not quickly enough. The comments section is now alive and chewing at the heart of Western democracy.
This is no accident. Trump’s entire campaign is an exercise in industrial-scale trolling, which does not for a second mean that it is not dangerous. It means that he is playing to an entirely different set of win conditions whereby victory goes to whoever screams the loudest. Democracy, to this man and his followers, is just a new system to game, and if it doesn’t deliver, they’ll try something else. What they want most is not the presidency – not in any serious way. I’m sure that Trump wants to sit in a shiny chair in the Oval Office and have people tell him all day that he’s the most powerful and impressive man in the world, and I’m just as sure that he doesn’t want to be bothered with the actual business of government. No, what his followers want is to scream and throw things until someone tells them they’re still special. Why? Because they can. Because it’s cathartic. Because they feel they have little to lose. Because it’s fun and it makes them feel big and powerful, and so little else does.
I’m sorry to say this, because it really doesn’t help, but some of us did warn the public about these people years ago. Back then they were confining their recreational bigotry to women and people of colour who were told to shut up and stop being so sensitive. It gives me no pleasure to be proved right on this one. Right now, anyone who fails to see the connection between gender politics and geopolitics either has their hands over their eyes or is looking over their shoulder to a time when a bit of boyish sexual violence didn’t disqualify you for elected office. But this is not just about feminism. This is, specifically, about consent. This is about people who feel entitled to dominate and control the bodies of one half of the population also feeling entitled to run the world, and the pathological pattern at play. What we’re dealing with is a man who wants to grab the whole world by the pussy and is bewildered and furious when the pussy grabs back.
And he’s not the only one of his kind. This has, lest we forget, been the pattern of patriarchal power-play for generations. For years, we’ve had to deal with household names, politicians, entertainers being revealed as serial sexual predators. We’ve had to come to terms with the truth that they were allowed to get away with it because that was just what it meant to be a successful man. You could grab whatever, whoever, you wanted. Women and girls were status objects there for the seizing, willing or not. That’s changing, because there are a lot of people out there who want it to change, but there are also a lot of other people who found that model of social violence comforting, people who are angry at these so-called ‘feminazis’ and their hormone-crazed demands to be treated like human beings with agency, people whose sense of being cheated out of their male birthright is an outlet for a more dangerous sense of socioeconomic betrayal, and most of those people have been rooting for Trump since day one. The new assault allegations are unlikely to damage his standing in their eyes.
Most Republican commentators with any sense are already consigning their party to cold storage, putting it into an induced coma to preserve whatever might survive this humiliation. The lemming-like rush to the political precipice may be premature. Trump is not going to pull out. He decided he wanted the presidency and now he believes himself entitled to it. He’s determined to fuck the world whether or not it’s willing, and you’d better hope the US is on some sort of birth control. People who do not respect the consent of individuals also tend to lack respect for the consent of the governed. They conceive of democratic consent exactly as they conceive of sexual consent: nice if you can get it, but if you can’t, you still deserve the spoils. This is the dictionary definition of chauvinism, and it is unlikely to be purged from the public mood come 9 November when this deeply unpleasant spectacle is finally over.
The kamikaze chauvinism of the alt-right did not emerge from nowhere. It’s the inevitable end-point of decades of popular discontent channelled and chaperoned by vested interests, the same vested interests that have funded the Republicans and their ilk for generations. For all their maidenly blushes over Trump’s crass misogyn
y, their tardy protestations over his attitude to the half of the population who are mothers, wives and daughters and, somewhat inconveniently, voters, conventional conservatives know that what Trump has done is simply to take contemporary right-wing rhetoric to its logical conclusion. He has torn away the modesty curtain of mainstream neoliberal debate and shown the jabbering psychopath behind it. That is profoundly embarrassing, and embarrassment is as likely to make people lash out as it is to make them roll over.
If your entire identity is built on a certain narrative, it is very hard to abandon that narrative even if it is destroying your chances of winning. Living with that sort of dissonance does strange things to the psyche. All sorts of wild, weird notions start creeping in. Words start coming out that make you sound cruel, crazed or both, although if you’re running for office, you usually try to hold back from saying them when there are cameras in the vicinity.
Trump is unusual only in that he lacks a filter. He really does say what many people are thinking, and the problem is that just because many people are thinking something does not make it right, or safe, or true. What America and the global conservative consensus see in Trump is their own faces in the haunted mirror of the modern media engine; they are not the only ones staring in horror.
The problem with being an arrogant sack of hair with the raw energy of the American id sustaining your own swollen ego is that when someone punctures it, you deflate with a fart sound that echoes around the world. Trump deserves every bit of this humiliation, but the movement behind him is driven by the wounded pride of millions. It is ferocious, unpredictable and not at all funny. I’m not laughing. This got beyond a joke years ago. Whoever wins this race, the war for decency and democracy will continue, and right now all of us are losing.
